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Posted at May 20/2009 10:13AM:
TWM: Notes. . .
We have never been (just) human. Heretical statement in the social sciences and humanities. Yet attention to things over the long term - to at least take seriously archaeology's etymological charter - and starting in medias res draws attention to distributed consciousness and agency as an inherent component of the human. Simply put, more and more tasks have been delegated to things over the course of (pre)history. The ecology of humans-and-things has 'evolved' into ever more intimate and densely inter-dependent relations. Thinking through ontology, of what it is to be human in terms of relationality, takes us away from the humancentricism (as Haraway put it) so woven through modernist thought. Post-essentialism (Woolgar), getting away from dissecting 'the human' out from our extensions in the world, moves us in the direction of equitable relations with the world - things, environment, companion species, and each other. To better equip us to 'live humanly in a sustainable world' (Shanks). To recognize the earth as a cyborg entity (cf. Haraway 1995); all its heterogenous components as symbiots due equal consideration in such an entire ecology.
Beginning from archaeology's charter, far from limiting the discipline to common matters of concern in a confining 'vulgar materialism' and forgetting the partnership with cultural anthropology, opens the field in radical ways to make substantial contributions in designing our cyborgic future.
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